mSpot cloud service is live!

Woo Hoo! After beginning the process last year, mSpot, the music cloud service, is finally live. During our month long private beta program, we’ve received a lot of great feedback and suggestions that we’ve incorporated into the service and continue to add to. Please let us know what you think of the public version.

Our design philosophy for mSpot is that rather than having a lot of bells and whistles (features), we’re focused on offering a few key ones that work very well – such as quick music playback and responsive UI. Even though you’re playing music from the cloud, the experience is so fast, it feels like the music is locally stored.

One obvious benefit of our cloud service is the ability to play anywhere. You’ll see us continuing this theme with the new phones and devices we plan to roll out. The “connected” experience you get from accessing you music in the cloud – is another big benefit giving you a richer listening experience with all kinds of content from the Internet. For example, you’ll see that some of your songs include the “L” icon at the upper right corner of the play controls screen. If you click on this, you’ll see lyrics of the song you’re listening. If you click on the album name or artist by the cover art, you may get discography or artist bio. This is all done automatically. Your music itself is now connected to the Internet.

We didn’t have time to add all of the features suggested by our beta testers, but we’re working on making them available soon.

Some of these features were requested by out beta testers. Here are a few I would like to highlight:

User control of quality vs. performance – this allows users to control the bit-rate of their songs in the mSpot cloud. The trade off is the higher the quality (bit-rate), the slower the music playback. In fact, there are bit-rate thresholds where live playback on mobile devices will not work for 2.5G and 3G.

Advance music upload configuration – we recognize users with music libraries larger than their allocated cloud storage space want control in terms of what gets uploaded to mSpot. We will allow users to control their uploads by selecting desired playlists, artists or albums.

Additional cloud storage – we tried to strike a balance between offering enough storage that satisfies majority of the typical users while not breaking the bank. We believe 2GB with compression is that D-mark. For users that need more space, we will offer a tiered plan for a nominal month fee.